I got mine yesterday. It's as good as everyone says. Sharp sharp sharp.

Can I ask you, what processing do you do on your photos? Lightroom or via PS actions?

I always start in Lightroom 4. I shoot RAW and convert to DNG in the first stage. I try to do a lot of my processing in Lightroom for one primary reason - every time I go into Photoshop (I have CS5) or Alien Skin Exposure 4 (a favorite program of mine), my file turns into a TIFF (even if I flatten the image before returning to Lightroom) and takes up up 5x the room. I use around 30GB of storage a month (before backups) as is, so if I do too many PS edits that can balloon to 60GB pretty quickly.

I only do edits in Photoshop if I need layering or to use luminosity masks.

I think I'd prefer it to the Canon Mark I version, but resale value will be a lot less.I've owned a number of Tamron Lenses, including the 200-500, and they were definitely not spectacular. I've considered buying this one, but I'm concerned that f/2.8 is not fast enough for my extreme low light work.

I really enjoyed your review. It was personal, balanced, thrustworthy and informative. I had hoped that more of the pictures would be able to open in larger versions to get a real feel for the lens. The onion I think I see in other pirctures as well (the bottle in the upper right corner, and in the large beautiful shot you have of a field with flowers in it). However, although I read that it is supposed to be conventional wisdom that this is a bad thing, for me I don't find it unappealing at all, and would even argue that it might add a touch of extra texture to the shots.

I really enjoyed your review. It was personal, balanced, thrustworthy and informative. I had hoped that more of the pictures would be able to open in larger versions to get a real feel for the lens. The onion I think I see in other pirctures as well (the bottle in the upper right corner, and in the large beautiful shot you have of a field with flowers in it). However, although I read that it is supposed to be conventional wisdom that this is a bad thing, for me I don't find it unappealing at all, and would even argue that it might add a touch of extra texture to the shots.

Looking forward to your next review!

G.

Thank you very much for the nice feedback. Others have requested larger images in the gallery next time as well, so I will certainly keep that in mind. This is my first go at a review of this length and depth, so I will hopefully improve with time.

Nice review, my tamron 24-70 is in the mail and gets here Monday. Looking forward to it. There simply is no reason in my mind to spend another $1000 for the canon unless you demand pixel level sharpness everywhere, and if that's the case you probably spend too much time behind the computer staring at 100% crops to be much good at anything else.

Nice review, my tamron 24-70 is in the mail and gets here Monday. Looking forward to it. There simply is no reason in my mind to spend another $1000 for the canon unless you demand pixel level sharpness everywhere, and if that's the case you probably spend too much time behind the computer staring at 100% crops to be much good at anything else.

That seems to be a conclusion that many have drawn. The Canon is better...but not $1000 better. That being said, I've got some pretty nice glass in my bag and yet have been quite impressed with the quality of what I can get with this lens. I've got a wedding next weekend and will give an update on how it performed for that.

Nice review, my tamron 24-70 is in the mail and gets here Monday. Looking forward to it. There simply is no reason in my mind to spend another $1000 for the canon unless you demand pixel level sharpness everywhere, and if that's the case you probably spend too much time behind the computer staring at 100% crops to be much good at anything else.

That seems to be a conclusion that many have drawn. The Canon is better...but not $1000 better. That being said, I've got some pretty nice glass in my bag and yet have been quite impressed with the quality of what I can get with this lens. I've got a wedding next weekend and will give an update on how it performed for that.

I found this pretty cool: I had stopped down for this shot (f/8), and I normally wouldn't even get this flare effect from the lens except that I was using a cheaper, uncoated circular polarizer (I have no collection of filters in this size and still need to invest in a quality circular polarizer). Anyway, despite the flare pattern, I really like how that the aperture is clearly very round even stopped down three stops. The flare pattern is much nicer for it.